What are the functions and limits of political power

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Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by
nature free and equal against claims
that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He
argued that people have rights, such as the
right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent
of the laws of any particular society.
Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of
the justification for understanding
legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where
people in the state of nature
conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order
to better ensure the stable,
comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since
governments exist by the consent of the
people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the
public good, governments that fail to do
so can be resisted and replaced with new governments. Locke is thus
also important for his defense of the
right of revolution. Locke also defends the principle of majority rule
and the separation of legislative and
executive powers. In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke denied
that coercion should be used to bring
people to (what the ruler believes is) the true religion and also denied
that churches should have any
coercive power over their members. Locke elaborated on these
themes in his later political writings, such as
the Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.
For a more general introduction to Locke's history and background,
the argument of the Two Treatises, and
the Letter Concerning Toleration, see Section 1, Section 3, and
Section 4, respectively, of the main entry
on John Locke in this encyclopedia. The present entry focuses on
seven central concepts in Locke's
political philosophy.

1. The Law of Nature

2. State of Nature
3. Property
4. Consent, Political Obligation, and the Ends of Government
5. Locke and Punishment
6. Separation of Powers and the Dissolution of Government
7. Toleration
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Related Entries 1. The Law of Nature
Perhaps the most central concept in Locke's political philosophy is his
theory of natural law and natural
rights. The natural law concept existed long before Locke as a way of
expressing the idea that there were
certain moral truths that applied to all people, regardless of the
particular place where they lived or the
agreements they had made. The most important early contrast was
between laws that were by nature, and
thus generally applicable, and those that were conventional and
operated only in those places where the
particular convention had been established. This distinction is
sometimes formulated as the difference
between natural law and positive law. Natural law is also distinct
from divine law in that the latter, in the Christian tradition, normally
referred to
those laws that God had directly revealed through prophets and other
inspired writers. Natural law can be
discovered by reason alone and applies to all people, while divine law
can be discovered only through
God's special revelation and applies only to those to whom it is
revealed and who God specifically indicates
are to be bound. Thus some seventeenth-century commentators,
Locke included, held that not all of the 10
commandments, much less the rest of the Old Testament law, were
binding on all people. The 10
commandments begin Hear O Israel and thus are only binding on
the people to whom they were
addressed (Works 6:37). As we will see below, even though Locke
thought natural law could be known
apart from special revelation, he saw no contradiction in God playing
a part in the argument, so long as the
relevant aspects of God's character could be discovered by reason
alone. In Locke's theory, divine law and
natural law are consistent and can overlap in content, but they are not
coextensive. Thus there is no
problem for Locke if the Bible commands a moral code that is stricter
than the one that can be derived from
natural law, but there is a real problem if the Bible teaches what is
contrary to natural law. In practice,
Locke avoided this problem because consistency with natural law was
one of the criteria he used when
deciding the proper interpretation of Biblical passages.
In the century before Locke, the language of natural rights also gained
prominence through the writings of
such thinkers as Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. Whereas natural law
emphasized duties, natural rights
normally emphasized privileges or claims to which an individual was
entitled. There is considerable
disagreement as to how these factors are to be understood in relation
to each other in Locke's theory. Leo
Strauss, and many of his followers, take rights to be paramount, going
so far as to portray Locke's position
as essentially similar to that of Hobbes. They point out that Locke
defended a hedonist theory of human
motivation (Essay 2.20) and claim that he must agree with Hobbes
about the essentially self-interested
nature of human beings. Locke, they claim, only recognizes natural
law obligations in those situations
where our own preservation is not in conflict, further emphasizing
that our right to preserve ourselves
trumps any duties we may have.
On the other end of the spectrum, more scholars have adopted the
view of Dunn, Tully, and Ashcraft that it
is natural law, not natural rights, that is primary. They hold that when
Locke emphasized the right to life,
liberty, and property he was primarily making a point about the duties
we have toward other people: duties
not to kill, enslave, or steal. Most scholars also argue that Locke
recognized a general duty to assist with
the preservation of mankind, including a duty of charity to those who
have no other way to procure their
subsistence (Two Treatises 1.42). These scholars regard duties as
primary in Locke because rights exist to
ensure that we are able to fulfill our duties. Simmons takes a position
similar to the latter group, but claims
that rights are not just the flip side of duties in Locke, nor merely a
means to performing our duties. Instead,
rights and duties are equally fundamental because Locke believes in a
robust zone of indifference in
which rights protect our ability to make choices. While these choices
cannot violate natural law, they are
not a mere means to fulfilling natural law either.
Another point of contestation has to do with the extent to which
Locke thought natural law could, in fact,
be known by reason. Both Strauss and Peter Laslett, though very
different in their interpretations of Locke
generally, see Locke's theory of natural law as filled with
contradictions. In the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Locke defends a theory of moral knowledge that
negates the possibility of innate ideas
(Essay Book 1) and claims that morality is capable of demonstration
in the same way that Mathematics is
(Essay 3.11.16, 4.3.1820). Yet nowhere in any of his works does
Locke make a full deduction of natural
law from first premises. More than that, Locke at times seems to
appeal to innate ideas in the Second
Treatise (2.11), and in The Reasonableness of Christianity (Works
7:139) he admits that no one has ever
worked out all of natural law from reason alone. Strauss infers from
this that the contradictions exist to
show the attentive reader that Locke does not really believe in natural
law at all. Laslett, more
conservatively, simply says that Locke the philosopher and Locke the
political writer should be kept very
separate.
More recent scholarship has tended to reject this position. Yolton,
Colman, Ashcraft, Grant, Simmons,
Tuckness and others all argue that there is nothing strictly inconsistent
in Locke's admission in The
Reasonableness of Christianity. That no one has deduced all of natural
law from first principles does not mean that none of it has been
deduced. The supposedly contradictory passages in the Two Treatises
are far
from decisive. While it is true that Locke does not provide a
deduction in the Essay, it is not clear that he
was trying to. Section 4.10.119 of that work seems more concerned
to show how reasoning with moral
terms is possible, not to actually provide a full account of natural law.
Nonetheless, it must be admitted that
Locke did not treat the topic of natural law as systematically as one
might like. Attempts to work out his
theory in more detail with respect to its ground and its content must
try to reconstruct it from scattered
passages in many different texts.
To understand Locke's position on the ground of natural law it must
be situated within a larger debate in
natural law theory that predates Locke, the so-called voluntarism-
intellectualism, or voluntaristrationalist debate. At its simplest, the
voluntarist declares that right and wrong are determined by God's
will and that we are obliged to obey the will of God simply because it
is the will of God. Unless these
positions are maintained, the voluntarist argues, God becomes
superfluous to morality since both the
content and the binding force of morality can be explained without
reference to God. The intellectualist
replies that this understanding makes morality arbitrary and fails to
explain why we have an obligation to
obey God.
With respect to the grounds and content of natural law, Locke is not
completely clear. On the one hand,
there are many instances where he makes statements that sound
voluntarist to the effect that law requires a
law giver with authority (Essay 1.3.6, 4.10.7). Locke also repeatedly
insists in the Essays on the Law of
Nature that created beings have an obligation to obey their creator
(ELN 6). On the other hand there are
statements that seem to imply an external moral standard to which
God must conform (Two Treatises
2.195; Works 7:6). Locke clearly wants to avoid the implication that
the content of natural law is arbitrary.
Several solutions have been proposed. One solution suggested by
Herzog makes Locke an intellectualist by
grounding our obligation to obey God on a prior duty of gratitude that
exists independent of God. A second
option, suggested by Simmons, is simply to take Locke as a
voluntarist since that is where the
preponderance of his statements point. A third option, suggested by
Tuckness (and implied by Grant), is to
treat the question of voluntarism as having two different parts,
grounds and content. On this view, Locke
was indeed a voluntarist with respect to the question why should we
obey the law of nature? Locke
thought that reason, apart from the will of a superior, could only be
advisory. With respect to content,
divine reason and human reason must be sufficiently analogous that
human beings can reason about what
God likely wills. Locke takes it for granted that since God created us
with reason in order to follow God's
will, human reason and divine reason are sufficiently similar that
natural law will not seem arbitrary to us.
Those interested in the contemporary relevance of Locke's political
theory must confront its theological
aspects. Straussians make Locke's theory relevant by claiming that the
theological dimensions of his
thought are primarily rhetorical; they are cover to keep him from
being persecuted by the religious
authorities of his day. Others, such as Dunn, take Locke to be of only
limited relevance to contemporary
politics precisely because so many of his arguments depend on
religious assumptions that are no longer
widely shared. More recently a number of authors, such as Simmons
and Vernon, have tried to separate the
foundations of Locke's argument from other aspects of it. Simmons,
for example, argues that Locke's
thought is over-determined, containing both religious and secular
arguments. He claims that for Locke the
fundamental law of nature is that as much as possible mankind is to
be preserved (Two Treatises 135). At
times, he claims, Locke presents this principle in rule-consequentialist
terms: it is the principle we use to
determine the more specific rights and duties that all have. At other
times, Locke hints at a more Kantian
justification that emphasizes the impropriety of treating our equals as
if they were mere means to our ends.
Waldron, in his most recent work on Locke, explores the opposite
claim: that Locke's theology actually
provides a more solid basis for his premise of political equality than
do contemporary secular approaches
that tend to simply assert equality.
With respect to the specific content of natural law, Locke never
provides a comprehensive statement of
what it requires. In the Two Treatises, Locke frequently states that the
fundamental law of nature is that as
much as possible mankind is to be preserved. Simmons argues that in
Two Treatises 2.6 Locke presents 1)
a duty to preserve one's self, 2) a duty to preserve others when self-
preservation does not conflict, 3) a duty
not to take away the life of another, and 4) a duty not to act in a way
that tends to destroy others. Libertarian interpreters of Locke tend
to downplay duties of type 1 and 2. Locke presents a more extensive
list in his earlier, and unpublished in his lifetime, Essays on the Law
of Nature. Interestingly, Locke here
includes praise and honor of the deity as required by natural law as
well as what we might call good
character qualities. 2. State of Nature
Locke's concept of the state of nature has been interpreted by
commentators in a variety of ways. At first
glance it seems quite simple. Locke writes want [lack] of a common
judge, with authority, puts all persons
in a state of nature and again, Men living according to reason,
without a common superior on earth, to
judge between them, is properly the state of nature. (Two Treatises
2.19) Many commentators have taken
this as Locke's definition, concluding that the state of nature exists
wherever there is no legitimate political
authority able to judge disputes and where people live according to
the law of reason. On this account the
state of nature is distinct from political society, where a legitimate
government exists, and from a state of
war where men fail to abide by the law of reason.
Simmons presents an important challenge to this view. Simmons
points out that the above statement is
worded as a sufficient rather than necessary condition. Two
individuals might be able, in the state of nature,
to authorize a third to settle disputes between them without leaving
the state of nature, since the third party
would not have, for example, the power to legislate for the public
good. Simmons also claims that other
interpretations often fail to account for the fact that there are some
people who live in states with legitimate
governments who are nonetheless in the state of nature: visiting aliens
(2.9), children below the age of
majority (2.15, 118), and those with a defect of reason (2.60). He
claims that the state of nature is a
relational concept describing a particular set of moral relations that
exist between particular people, rather
than a description of a particular geographical territory. The state of
nature is just the way of describing the
moral rights and responsibilities that exist between people who have
not consented to the adjudication of
their disputes by the same legitimate government. The groups just
mentioned either have not or cannot give
consent, so they remain in the state of nature. Thus A may be in the
state of nature with respect to B, but
not with C.
Simmons' account stands in sharp contrast to that of Strauss.
According to Strauss, Locke presents the state
of nature as a factual description of what the earliest society is like, an
account that when read closely
reveals Locke's departure from Christian teachings. State of nature
theories, he and his followers argue, are
contrary to the Biblical account in Genesis and evidence that Locke's
teaching is similar to that of Hobbes.
As noted above, on the Straussian account Locke's apparently
Christian statements are only a faade
designed to conceal his essentially anti-Christian views. According to
Simmons, since the state of nature is
a moral account, it is compatible with a wide variety of social
accounts without contradiction. If we know
only that a group of people are in a state of nature, we know only the
rights and responsibilities they have
toward one another; we know nothing about whether they are rich or
poor, peaceful or warlike.
A complementary interpretation is made by John Dunn with respect to
the relationship between Locke's
state of nature and his Christian beliefs. Dunn claimed that Locke's
state of nature is less an exercise in
historical anthropology than a theological reflection on the condition
of man. On Dunn's interpretation,
Locke's state of nature thinking is an expression of his theological
position, that man exists in a world
created by God for God's purposes but that governments are created
by men in order to further those
purposes.
Locke's theory of the state of nature will thus be tied closely to his
theory of natural law, since the latter
defines the rights of persons and their status as free and equal persons.
The stronger the grounds for
accepting Locke's characterization of people as free, equal, and
independent, the more helpful the state of
nature becomes as a device for representing people. Still, it is
important to remember that none of these
interpretations claims that Locke's state of nature is only a thought
experiment, in the way Kant and Rawls
are normally thought to use the concept. Locke did not respond to the
argument where have there ever
been people in such a state by saying it did not matter since it was
only a thought experiment. Instead, he argued that there are and have
been people in the state of nature. (Two Treatises 2.14) It seems
important to
him that at least some governments have actually been formed in the
way he suggests. How much it matters
whether they have been or not will be discussed below under the topic
of consent, since the central question
is whether a good government can be legitimate even if it does not
have the actual consent of the people
who live under it; hypothetical contract and actual contract theories
will tend to answer this question
differently.